To explain these results, we test whether the well established intuition of ideas being more homogeneous within demographic groups than between [1]}, [2]} holds true for the alters' ideas. We find that idea-pairs within gender/race are indeed significantly more similar to each other than idea-pairs between gender/race (2-tailed tests; gender: \(t(4633)=11.66\) , \(P<10^{-30}\) ; race: \(t(4870)=5.73\) , \(P<10^{-7}\) ; Figure REF ; Methods). Thus, it follows logically that homophily-guided network dynamics can make a follower's stimuli idea-set uniform and similar. This can deprive the follower of possible diversity bonuses, partly explaining the increased inter-ego semantic similarity observed in the treatment condition that can stem from having similar stimuli.
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